Category Archives: Task 3

Below is just some images of our landscape and character that I liked the look of. Some of them show issues we experience and how we overcame it, some I just like and cannot really recall the reason for screenshot-ing them. Is that even a word? Is it screenshooting? Hmm…

Rendering scene seven (flag scene) it only showed one frame when put into FCheck but it had actually rendered each frame? It also had the sky missing but it showed up on my Mac

Jump in camera between scene 2 and 3

Matthew managed to make his scene over twice the length it should have been, I had showed him the table with the length of the scenes in it but he must have forgotten because he said that we had never decided on a set length for the scene.

I helped him retexture the dinosaurs and importing the scene into the landscape, but having keyed all the values of the rocks he wasn’t able to move them into the correct position and had to reanimate them, which he put off doing until the second years told him that there wasn’t another way around it. It was understandable that he was reluctant to redo something that took him ages but it was frustrating at the same time. He also didn’t have a set camera so I added that in for him, although seeing it later once Ryan had put it together I saw that it was a poorly thought out position.

Then the scene had to be rendered which held up Ryan editing it together.

Matthew was responsible for sound but said that day that he didn’t actually have software to create any music or add sound effects to the animation

Since Matthew’s scene was longer, we cut scene 6 and scene 7 was left out due to the rendering error so Ryan had to try and work the scene’s we had into something presentable.

NOTE: Feedback for this presentation is under New Narratives > Task 4

Things I forgot to say when presenting:

Parasaurolophuses were both bipeds and quadrupeds and a breed of Hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur)

Their name means “near crested lizard” in latin

Tyrannosaurs, whilst having short arms (1m) relative to their height, had extremely thick humerus so that means their arms were actually rather powerful as the bone was thicker to support large muscle tissue

Both dinosaurs would have inhabited what is now know as North America but at the time was part of a larger continent known as Laramidia, so the continents had begun to separate from their original mass of Pangea

Some films and television series that influenced us in the genre and overall direction of the animation are cited below.

Both Cheaper by the Dozen and Laurel & Hardy are in the slapstick comedy genre that is really relevant to the plot of our 15 second film. We intend to have our T-Rex getting slapped in the face with a rock by the Parasaurolophus. These examples are great examples of comedic timing.

Furthermore, Laurel & Hardy, is similar in to our animation in that it is accidental conflict that sets in motion the chain of events that leads to the T-Rex throwing a stone. This also links into the conventions of comedy that we have been learning about in our lectures as conflict is a key component in this genre, along with bright colours, upbeat music (Matthew is researching that), quick camera changes to emphasise the comedic timing- the pace is key in making things funny quite often in comedies- it has to flow quickly, and hopefully shots that highlight emotions that the characters are experiencing.

Land Before Time was really just a film that we all enjoyed watching when we were younger and they had full body dinosaurs too. I didn’t actually realise this at the time but we have a Parasaurolophus which is the same species of dinosaur as Ducky in the film (coincidently my favourite character).

I also just really enjoyed the TV show Primeval and I’m still annoyed that it was cancelled. I did get to meet Hannah Spearitt at Comic-Con last year though so that did make up for it a bit. Anyway, we decided that it was worthy of a mention.

NOTE: I forgot to say this, or maybe I said it earlier, I can barely remember anything at the minute. Our characters are darker to contrast and make them stand out from the background like in Rayman, taken from what Andrew said in his talk, and linking back in to our original inspiration.

Box set

Citations:

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) VHS. Directed by Shawn Levy. United States of America: 20th Century Fox.

This is me trying to have the flagpole rotate from side to side as if it is being swung. Matthew pointed out that the rectangular shape of the flag looked too perfect, so I changed it to a triangle and slightly off white. The movement of the flagpole from side to side seems a little to slow though.

So this is scene 7 with the characters in the correct position, although I will need to scale the bushes up in order to conceal the T-Rex’s head more, also, our group thinks that it is rather comical having it unable to properly conceal itself due to its size.

I was speaking to my granda about our animation and about the idea of the T-Rex flying a little white flag to symbolise it’s surrender, and he thought it was pretty good. So, I went about trying to make it.

Initially I was going to use nCloth. Everything had appeared to work perfectly well, it was acting like silk and crumpling nicely with the gravity, then I tried to move it.

I still don’t know what I was doing wrong, maybe it was just a bad day to use Maya, but it would not move. Anytime that I tried to move both the flag and the flag pole, only the pole would move. I tried to find out how to fix this and it said about parenting the flag to the pole before adding cloth and then another one said about trying to parent the nucleus of the cloth to the pole, so I was confused and decided to try and find another way.

Initially I started adding joints into since we had just had the lecture on joints, then I figured that I was making this far more complicated than it needed to be. Amy then suggested using a lattice to deform it and I was about to when I clicked onto the deformers tab and saw the wave deformer tool.

JACKPOT!

I applied that to the flag and ended up with a nice wave, then I played about with the amplitude until I got an proportionate displacement for the size of flag. I then went to animate this by changing the different translate values before realising, that again, I was making this more complicated than it needed to be. So instead of doing that, I simply switched between 0.1 and -0.1 in the amplitude and keyed that at regular intervals to get a good looking movement on the flag.

Then came the fun of animating the swing of the flag. I started off with it rising up unrealistically smoothly from the ground, so then I added a little bit of a stutter I suppose to the movement, making it more clumsy and befitting of our T-Rex character. Once I was satisfied with that, I then had to do the side to side wave. The rotation of the flag pole was fine to do, but the flag itself seemed to detach and pass through the pole for some reason so I had to key the translate values once I had imported into the correct position on the landscape.

Upon Matthew’s suggestion I changed the shape of the flag as the perfect rectangular shape looked rather odd, I had tried to make it look ragged but it didn’t react realistically so I settled for making it off-white and to triangular.

Having received feedback from the last presentation, I created another animatic and then asked Amy to put it together in Premiere because I got lost. She then put it on dropbox for our group to see and sent me a link to a tutorial on how to solve the problem I had.

We needed a 3D animatic pretty urgently, so I sat down last night once I got home and quickly made this. You can tell at which point I got fed up because I could even manage to arch the stones as they flew at the T-Rex.

Ryan took over creating the landscape when my Mac started playing up and he created this.

I said about creating the mountains for it and came up with these as the result.

Getting the height

Adding textures

Adding textures

Adding textures

I downloaded a greyscale image of a mountain range from above and increased the contrast in Photoshop before saving it as a .png in SourceImages. Then in Maya created a plane, (in surfaces) opened sculpt geometry tool, selected pull mode and then imported the map onto the plane creating a quick mountain range which i scaled up and then pulled some vertices higher.

Ryan put his landscape onto Dropbox for us to access and since our story involves stones getting thrown into a river I looked into adding water to it.